Grief During COVID

COVID deaths have crossed the 200,000 mark. That number does not include the people who didn’t and didn’t need to die because they were unable to receive timely medical care for other ailments due to the logjams in our hospitals.

It also doesn’t include the COVID related grief of not being able to be with your loved one while they are dying or having a loved one die without receiving the sacraments because of COVID. I’ve read stories online of people whose priests refused to go to hospitals or nursing homes because the priest was afraid of contracting COVID.

I didn’t have that experience. My pastor, God love him, was willing to come to my mother’s bedside as she was dying. But he was not allowed in. No one in my family could be there except me, and I was only allowed in at the very last. I honestly don’t think Mama would have died then if I had been able to continue visiting her and coaxing her to eat and keeping her going the way I had before COVID.

That is a different, COVID-related aspect of grief that people are suffering today.

I think the emotional wounds of COVID are going to be raw and hurting for a long time after this pandemic finally passes. Grief over the deaths during COVID is just one of the many wounds this pandemic is inflicting on our psyches. The isolation is another deep wound that will change most of us for a long time to come.